As I wrote before, these days it is possible to get insane amounts of memory into consumer PC — and that way to build monstrous developer machines with small investments. Excuse to upgrade my development environment came as we started new interesting projects at work, where it is required to develop and test software in clustered environments — and at the moment it seems that service providers are slow to deliver requested development servers.

Coughing up little over 1300 euros got me a brand new pc with Intel X79 chipset, i7 processor, Windows 7, SSD system disk, separate data disk and 32 gigabytes of memory. That is more than enough to serve as a development machine and allows me to test at home environment different cluster setups – and run multiple virtual machines at the same time.

And you know what?

This new machine absolutely rocks. Though I still have my iMac as my main machine – this Windows 7 development machine with linux virtual machines is insanely good with insane amounts of bang for the buck. As a desktop environment Windows has improved a lot – and though developing on OS X is still much more fun ( proper shell and *nix foundations ) Java development on Windows environment is no longer that bad! A lot of that is of course because of Netbeans, which provides an amazing development environment – where you do not need to or want go to the command line so often.